Marketing “Proper” Names: Female Authors, Sensation

MARKETING “PROPER” NAMES: FEMALE AUTHORS, SENSATION DISCOURSE, AND THE MID-VICTORIAN LITERARY PROFESSION By Heather Freeman Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August, 2013 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Carolyn Dever Jay Clayton Rachel Teukolsky James Epstein Copyright © 2013 by Heather Freeman All Rights Reserved For Sean, with gratitude for your love and unrelenting support iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation would not have been possible without the influence, patience, and feedback of a number of people, but I owe a particular debt to my committee, Professors Carolyn Dever, Jay Clayton, Rachel Teukolsky, and Jim Epstein. Their insightful questions and comments not only strengthened this project but also influenced my development as a writer and a critic over the last five years. As scholars and teachers, they taught me how to be engaged and passionate in the archive and in the classroom as well. My debt to Carolyn Dever, who graciously acted as my Director, is, if anything, compound. I cannot fully express my gratitude for her warmth, patience, incisive criticism, and unceasing willingness to read drafts, even when she didn’t really have the time. The administrative women of the English Department provided extraordinary but crucial support and encouragement throughout my career at Vanderbilt. Particular thanks go to Janis May and Sara Corbitt, and to Donna Caplan, who has provided a friendly advice, a listening ear, and much-needed perspective since the beginning. I also owe a great deal of thanks to my colleagues in the graduate program at Vanderbilt. To my fellow Victorianists, Sarah Kersh, Diana Bellonby, Stephanie Higgs, and Dan Fang, thank you for your intellectual excitement and for all of your encouragement. And to Cari Hovanec, Donika Ross, and Elizabeth Barnett, thank you for creating a supportive community of scholars and friends, for making this entire experience more of a joy than a drudgery. iv Long before this dissertation began to take shape, Professors Roberta Frank and Janice Carlyle at Yale inspired me to pursue an academic career, and my gratitude to them is inexpressible. I owe my passion for Victorian literature and identification as a Victorianist to Janice Carlyle, who first introduced me to the strange genre that is sensation fiction. I also must thank my first teachers, my parents Michael and Laura Freeman, for encouraging my love of reading as a child and for supporting me in everything I’ve done. I could never have done this without you both. Finally, huge thanks must go to my partner Sean Gandert. For reading my first drafts, for believing in me and in my ideas, for patiently listening to me think things out. And for everything else. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………………iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………....iv Chapter INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………..1 The “Sensation” Decade………………………………………………………..…6 Proper Names, Property, and Propriety………………………………………….14 From Celebrity to Brand: A New Model of Professionalization………………...24 I. “PLAIN AS PRINT”: NAMES IN SENSATION NOVELS……………..….….32 Feigning Names……………………………………………………….…34 No Name and the Literary Forbears of “Nobody’s Childen”…………….37 Pseudonymous Power in No Name………………………………………46 Magdalen, Proper and Perverse……………………………………….…52 II. THE “VICTORIA(N)” PROFESSION…….…………………………..…...……58 Constructing Victoria Regina—baby ‘Drina and Angelic Albert………..64 Branding and Authorizing an Alternative “Victoria”……………………75 Victoria Auctor, and the Problem of “Mrs. Brown”…………………..…81 III. ‘A NAME WHICH MIGHT HAVE BEEN ONLY FAVOURABLY KNONW”: CONSTRUCTIONS AND RECONSTRUCTIONS OF CAROLINE NORTON………………………………………………………………………...92 Marital Fiction/Professional Reality……………………………………..95 Early Literary Celebrity: Aristocratic Constructions…………………...101 Norton’s Reconstructions: Marriage, Legal Fictions, and the Aristocracy……………………………………………………………...115 A Novel Man: Norton’s Sensational Aristocratic Heroes………………132 vi IV. A GENERATIVE PROFESSION: THE SELF-MARKETING LEGACIES OF “MRS. HENRY WOOD” AND “MRS. OLIPHANT………………………….140 East Lynne and the Powerful Legacy of “Isabel”……………………....146 Mrs. Henry Wood: Taking the Veil…………………………………….157 Mrs. Oliphant and Alternative Genealogies: Rewriting the Family Tree……………………………………………………………………..171 V. A SENSATIONAL PROFESSION: PERIODICALS AND PLAGIARISM......193 Expanding Sensation: Braddon and Belgravia………………………....196 A Study in Contrasts: The “Uncertain Trade of Brain-Selling”………..212 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………....226 vii INTRODUCTION In the 1860s English literary marketplace, the newly hybridized sensation genre became a discursive keynote of the period, emerging out of a constellation of cultural anxieties about identity, gender, inheritance, and modernity. During the mid-Victorian period, proper names functioned as the ultimate sensational trope, particularly for women: they provided easy, straightforward identification and self-definition—the ultimate signifier of patriarchal inscription—while also being always unstable, changeable, and alienable. In this dissertation, I focus on female authors who use both their “proper,” legal names and strategic alternative names to navigate the literary marketplace in an attempt to gain and maintain economic security. In so doing, they not only insist on but actually legitimate their roles in the nascent literary profession. Their names gain momentum, separate from these original “authors,” once they enter the literary market as celebrity signifiers and brands, becoming encoded with an array of overlapping, contradictory narratives. In the process, the circulation of these names reconceptualizes the literary profession as an unstably gendered space that is neither masculine nor feminine. These names further de- and reconstruct categories of gender and identity in an array of interpenetrating social structures, including legal discourse, the family unit, and the economic market. Female authors in the nineteenth century published under a variety of naming conventions, from maiden names and married names to pseudonyms and substitutes for names, such as “by the author of” and “anonymous.” Overall, these names are fraught textual constructs that elide embodied writers while seemingly defining their identities. 1 Much critical work has been done on anonymous and pseudonymous publication, but little work has been done addressing what Gerard Genette terms “onymity,” or the act of publishing under one’s given name. Genette elaborates with regard to his coinage, “After all, to sign a work with one’s real name is a choice like any other, and nothing authorizes us to regard this choice as insignificant” (39-40). In his edited volume on anonymous authorship, Richard Griffin argues that, “[t]he author’s name is another artifact, at a distance from the empirical writer, a signifier within the semiotics of the text that can be manipulated strategically…” (10). Notably, though, his critical volume proceeds to analyze anonymity, rather than onymity. I argue that “proper” names and processes of authorial naming merit increased critical attention, since they function as a nexus for considering new phenomena in the literary marketplace, including increasingly professionalized female authors. My dissertation analyzes both the “artifactual,” as Griffin terms it, and rhetorical nature of legal names that belong to celebrity women sensation authors who achieved literary success in the 1860s. My project is fundamentally about gender in the mid-Victorian period, and as such the notion of separate spheres is crucial to my arguments about the difficulties female authors had in gaining recognition as professional writers. However, I follow critical tradition in treating the distinction between public and private as a powerful discursive, fictional construction, rather than as a true binary. As Caroline Levine insists in “Strategic Formalisms,” “[S]cholars have successfully unsettled the notion of a rigid divide between public and private, showing that Victorian women played significant roles outside of the home, while men struggled to find their proper places within the domestic sphere” (627). The ordering discourse of separate spheres remains useful to my project 2 insofar as it remains a powerful, albeit unstable, narrative in Victorian culture. I argue that the idea of the proper name functions as a similarly policing, ordering discourse that is similarly disrupted and destabilized in practice. My dissertation is invested in tracing the pseudonymous, “improper” condition of women’s names in Victorian England, in distinction to the socially accepted, properly valenced name, while also mapping their increasing power and importance. Throughout this dissertation, I discuss and theorize the construction of names and the concept of naming in the mid-Victorian period through the lens of women’s unstable nominative status and the tension between patronymic nominal inheritance, with its ostensible reassurance of domestic propriety, and market-driven authorial branding. The names of women authors carry multiple meanings, including legal signature, linguistic/textual sign, brand name (in the case of celebrity authors), familial/ancestral marker, and, particularly for sensation authors, potential scandalous disguise. While names convey powerful epistemological assurance, my argument will demonstrate that they ultimately

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